Statements of Diagnosis. As we study users with self-reported statements of diagnosis, our method only potentially captures a sub-population of each disorder—those who choose to disclose a diagnosis on a public platform under the option of anonymity. While we have attempted to increase the precision of identifying individuals who are diagnosed with specific disorders through
significant manual annotation,
in the lack of clinically-aligned user data, we nonetheless are unable to verify if genuine-appearing disclosures of mental health disorder diagnoses are ultimately truthful. However, as noted by [1]}, given the stigmas often associated with mental illnesses, it seems unlikely that users would disclose that they were diagnosed with a condition they do not possess. Individuals who may be diagnosed with affective disorders undoubtedly also remain in the set of all users that we compare disclosers against and, as such, our results on platform user activity differences should only be interpreted in the context of discovering broad themes—not as ground truths of comparisons between those who are diagnosed and those who aren't.
Finally, we also note concerns in clinical psychology on the heterogeneity of psychiatric diagnoses, which remains contentious in current literature. Notably, that standards of diagnosis all use different decision-making rules, that significant overlaps exist in symptoms between diagnoses,
and that they may instead mask the complex underlying causes of human distress with potentially scientifically meaningless labels
[2]}.
